Scott Blomquist

A couple of acquaintances of mine in puzzle-land (Mark Gottlieb and Mike Selinker) developed this year’s Maze of Games for Gen Con, and I had the pleasure of being subjected to the puzzles for purposes of beta testing. There were a bunch of really fun puzzles in the set, but the most memorable phenomenon from the evening o’ testing was how exaspirated Mark became over the fact that time after time, every single one of us playtesters repeatedly failed to read the instructions despite having been regularly reminded to do so. This often made the puzzles harder than they needed to be, and sometimes made them nearly impossible. Y’see, we are all regular participants in the type of puzzle competition where there are no instructions on the puzzles. We’ve been heavily conditioned to just start seeking signal in the noise and expect a word or short phrase to pop out the other end. These puzzles took that form exactly, except they had instructions. I swear that in every case where I got reminded to read the instructions, I didn’t even notice that they were on the page. I swear.